Best CSS framework? Tailwind for indie hackers?

Haha, these kinds of questions are like religious discussions: everyone has their favorite language and framework.

If you feel like it's easier to get started with Bulma why don't you stay with it? At the end what matter is the final product. No one really cares which framework you're using.

I've used:

• Bulma
• Bootstrap
• Material UI
• Tailwind

And they more or less provide a similar experience. Their underlying philosophy as a CSS framework is different tho.

Good luck!

I love Bootstrap. By customizing the Sass variables and building it you get a custom look and feel in a couple of hours.

In all cases, I choose what take me from nothing to something in the shortest time. Usually, it's Bootstrap, not Tailwind. Even if I would definitely like to use Tailwind in the future.

I love Tailwind, but given what you've said and the question in the poll, I'm not so sure it's the answer for you. It sounds like you're looking for something that works straight out of the box, and that's not Tailwind. The strength with Tailwind, as I see it, is the balance of rapid development with high flexibility. But you have to know what you're doing, just with regular css.

Unless you can afford tailwindui.com and just copy paste I think there might be better options.

I don't have any tips for you, as I only use Tailwind now but if Bulma feels like a better match, I'd say go for it.

If you're using React, Chakra is a good option. Its essentially Tailwind but with built in components

Personally I use bootstrap, but only grid and utility classes. Everything else I prefer to build from scratch

Whatever the framework, nowadays, websites have almost all the same look...

Users don't care how you develop your website, so all depends of you (as dev). Take what you prefer, and if you don't care too, take a template already made and focus on the product itself.
To choose a template, I would recommend bootstrap because it's more global

If you're just started and are already learning one of these systems please go ahead with this one. Most frameworks have a bit of a learning curve.

I did some bootstrap back in the day, tried Bulma but now settled with Tailwind. It's wonderful in combination with vue or react components . Also love purgeCSS that makes the Tailwind CSS used on that page tiny.

But it's kinda worthless if you just load the CSS from a CDN.

Bootstrap is easy to learn, use www.3wschools.com to learn everything you need to know about bootstrap and other tools web design tools, plus thousands of working demos and all for free.

Bootstrap contains basic styling which is ready for use, tailwind is more like a set of utilities. I'd go with bootstrap to create a MVP and then Tailwind for quickly building a custom interface.

You can also check out some of the UI Kits on Themesberg. They're built with Bootstrap. Some of them are free to use as well :) https://themesberg.com/

I'd only go for Tailwind if I had some custom, simple website to make. For anything more complex - Bootstrap or Material UI / Vuetify will be a better choice if you want to build quickly. You have all components included, tested and good customization options if you need them.

If you're using React antd (https://ant.design/components/overview/) is definitely the best choice!

Tailwind is love. haha But I suggest you try the other UI frameworks first, Boostrap, Material UI , Bulma if you are a beginner. only after you did it. You will find the value on Tailwind.

The customer doesn't care which, as long as you end up with a responsive site at the end of the day it doesn't really matter.

I personally just use Bootstrap as I already know it, may try out another one in future although I have more important things to spend time on at the moment.

I am using Tachyons (https://tachyons.io) for years, its the same idea as Tailwind, and I love it, but my next project will be on Tailwind as it seem much more up to date.

I like MaterialUI, but not because its style or CSS capabilities, but because it has many pre-made components that also include the needed functionality and are really easy to customize. I feel that with Tailwind you only get some utility classes, so it's not really comparable with MaterialUI for example.

Former Bulma user here who recently switched to Tailwind. I originally switched to Bulma as they didn’t care about JS. Everything was handled by Turing classes on and off so it provided freedom around JS needs. What I didn’t like about Bulma is that all of my sites started to look the same.

I have been using Tailwind for a few months now and love the utility first approach and the fact that It doesn’t make everything look the same. Now with that said, I don’t love the amount of classes I have to use and the “apply” type syntax to build reusable classes is not ideal. I find myself building more reusable components in Vue then reusable classes.

I honestly don’t think you can go wrong with either.

I will probably not add much to the discussion, but I don't rely on these frameworks — the cost of learning and fully "owning" the frontend with them, with custom components, etc. is a bit too close if not higher to the handmade style with SCSS :-)

Use Tailwind in my agency job and side projects. I can't think ever going back to another framework. Use PurgeCSS with it and enjoy 10kb on average css files :)

Tailwind CSS is the best framework out there. It is not restrictive but allows non designers to be able to easily design a nice website.

Check out my repo https://git.io/awesome-tailwindcss for lots of examples and UI's to use.

I had the similar experience with Tailwind CSS. But if you have some basic experience with CSS framework in general then you can choose tailwind. Otherwise my recommendation would be to choose Bootstrap. Recently I started developing my application using Bootstrap 5 (which is not yet released). See my app https://autoapi-737fc.web.app/ The good part is that, bootstrap 5 is completely removed JQuery.

To build a UI like heroku won't take much time to do in Tailwind for someone who has experience with it. But as you're new to tailwind it won't be a good choice, but you can use a UI kit for faster development. https://tailwindui.com is a tailwind based UI kit made by the creators of TailwindCSS. I also have a component based library made with TailwindCSS (https://zukoni.com)

I suggest you to use a full features component library, for react there is chakra ui, blueprint and material ui for example

Of course, you should use what you are familiar with, but if you are a beginner in 2020 what would the choice be? Another example of a very "indie hacker" technology to me would be Firebase.

I'm not really looking to customize every single aspect of the UI; I just want something that looks good out of the box, easy to use, easy to get started with, and could support further customization down the line if need be.